Nature Valley Trail View Case Study

Nature Valley Trail View is a National Park preservation and conservation platform. The initial phase was built using Street View technology on trails in National Parks for the first time ever. Trail View is a living, and continually evolving platform. The full experience is being blogged here. Our amazing partners, Your Majesty, continue to kill this for us. Visit the site here naturevalleytrailview.com.

Two years after the project launched it "was ranked one of the most-awarded digital campaigns in the world," according to The Gunn Report.

Effectiveness To date, the goal was to increase the percentage of ratio of traffic to page visits by at least 25%; comparing the ratio for the six months of reporting pre-launch (191.9%) to the six months post-launch (402.4%), we came close (210.5%) to eclipsing the goal by a magnitude of ten (Facebook Insights). The platform was featured in Google's Creative Sandbox and IDEO's lecture series, and has been written about in The New York Times, FastCompany, and NBC News, among others. Nature Valley has been saluted for inspiring a new generation of nature-lovers and preserving the parks digitally for all time.

Strategy Last year, Nature Valley asked us to think of new ways to tackle the challenge of national park preservation on a larger scale and help them engage with their customers in an authentic, meaningful way without any paid media.Nature Valley’s core customers are nature-lovers. The only thing more valuable to them than spending time outdoors is going online to plan their next adventure. To that end, we built a first-of-it’s-kind street view experience on hiking trails in the U.S. national parks.And since launching, we’ve gained an understanding of how nature-lovers experienced the platform, and a deeper understanding of how the client wanted to use the platform to engage with them. Trail View was destined to become a more interactive preservation platform, and 2.0 was born out of this insight. Its evolution includes an interactive hub for all of the brand’s preservation activity, social functionality, and a mobile-optimized experience.

Execution To digitally preserve the National Parks, we created a street view experience on backcountry hiking trails for the first time ever. This required building a customized backpack camera and GPS rig that allowed us to capture 360-degree imagery along the trails. We then integrated that footage with topographic map data to design an interactive platform built on the Google maps API. And in its second iteration, the resulting site has now evolved into a more robust platform for all of the brand’s preservation activity. To enhance the appeal to our target, we partnered with a cadre of outdoors-focused media outlets, including National Geographic and Backpacker. To bring in a broader audience, we began a vigorous public relations effort highlighted by features in the New York Times and Conde Nast Traveler, among others. And using social outlets to engage the Trail View community has sustained momentum as the site evolves.